Broken at Palazzo Strozzi 2026–27: Dates, Tickets & What to See

A marble hand the size of a person has stood in the open courtyard of the Capitoline Museums in Rome since 1486. Tourists photograph it on the way to somewhere else. In September it comes to Florence, indoors, lit, at eye level, and stops being scenery.

That hand belonged to a colossal statue of Constantine, and it is the anchor of Broken. The Power of the Fragment, at Palazzo Strozzi from 25 September 2026 to 24 January 2027.

In 3 minutes

• Eighty-plus works, from Egypt and classical Greece to Louise Bourgeois and Huma Bhabha, on the piano nobile, plus a new Mark Manders installation in the free courtyard
• Ticket prices are not published yet. The Vivaticket page exists but carries no public price, and the museum's tickets page still shows only the Rothko tariff
• Free with the Firenze Card, no reservation, fast track. Most people assume a private foundation would be excluded. It is not

What is the Broken exhibition arguing?

Most exhibitions of ancient sculpture apologise for the damage. Wall texts explain what a statue looked like before the nose went. Reconstructions fill in the missing arm. The fragment is treated as a problem.

Broken inverts that. The curators' line, on the museum's own page, is that fragments "exist as autonomous objects, worthy of being observed and interpreted as works of art in their own right." The Italian is blunter: opere d'arte a sé stanti, works of art standing on their own.

The second half of the argument is where it gets uncomfortable. The show tracks why these things broke: ancient and modern iconoclasm, religious reform, the French Revolution, both world wars, vandalism, natural disaster. Among them, the Florence flood of 1966. That is the one destruction event on the list that happened to this city, and putting it in a Florentine palace alongside Constantine and Akhenaten is a deliberate move.

Curators are C.D. Dickerson III, dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and Andrew Sears, assistant curator of northern European paintings, both at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, with Arturo Galansino of Palazzo Strozzi.

Which works should you plan your visit around?

No checklist has been published. The museum's press area has cartelle stampa for every recent show and nothing for Broken, so expect the full list at the September press preview. Five works are confirmed by name so far, and three of them are worth building the visit around.

The right hand of Constantine, c. 330 CE, Musei Capitolini. Over-lifesize marble, index finger raised, the surviving piece of a statue that once stood around twelve metres. It has been outdoors in the Capitoline cortile since 1486, which means five centuries of Roman weather and five centuries of being read as architecture rather than art. Seeing it in a gallery is the exhibition's whole thesis compressed into one object.

Bronze remains of an equestrian statue from the Athenian Agora, c. 303–302 BCE. One of the earliest known bronze equestrian statues, and never exhibited outside Greece. Ancient bronze was recyclable, so large bronzes were routinely melted down; what survives survived by being buried or lost. These fragments exist because the destruction was incomplete. Set them against the marble and you see that materials fail differently. Marble breaks. Bronze disappears.

Nose and Lips of Akhenaten, c. 1353–1336 BCE, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Palazzo Strozzi chose this as the face of the show, which tells you something. It is not a head or a torso but a sliver of Amarna stone holding a nose and a mouth, reduced past the point where it should be identifiable, and still unmistakably Akhenaten. It also carries the iconoclasm theme directly: his images were attacked systematically after his death.

Also confirmed: a basanite head of a youth from the Musei Vaticani, and a life-size figure of a woman from Tamtoc in Mexico, found in 2005 and never shown in the United States. Michelangelo, Rodin, Canova, Giovanni Pisano, Bourgeois, Bhabha, Robert Gober and Danh Vo are named as participating, with no titles released yet.

What to know about Palazzo Strozzi before you book

This is the part that catches people, and it has nothing to do with the art.

Palazzo Strozzi is not a museum. It is an exhibition hall with no permanent collection, and it goes dark between shows. Rothko closes on 23 August 2026 and Broken opens on 25 September, so for roughly four and a half weeks there is nothing on the paid floor. Google Maps will keep listing the venue as open. Every cycle this produces the same one-star reviews from people who bought tickets in advance and arrived to a closed gallery. Check the homepage: if it says "coming soon", it means it.

The courtyard is free and it is one of the better free stops in central Florence. You enter from three sides without passing a ticket desk. Manders' installation will be there. The Project Space, three rooms off the courtyard, is also free. If you land in the gap, that is still worth ten minutes and a coffee.

Plan 60 to 90 minutes for the paid floor. Visitors consistently report that range, and the museum offers no estimate of its own beyond an audio guide that runs about an hour. The complaint that recurs in reviews is that a small show and a large show cost the same, so the value swings.

Don't pre-book out of habit. Strozzi is a walk-up venue most of the time, and the official position is that the courtyard desk sells tickets even when online shows sold out. The exception is the final fortnight of a hit: the Fra Angelico show ended with people reporting three to five hour queues in January 2026. Go at the 10:00 opening or on a Thursday evening, when the palace stays open until 23:00.

Practical info

Frequently asked questions

When does Broken open at Palazzo Strozzi?

Broken. The Power of the Fragment runs from 25 September 2026 to 24 January 2027, confirmed on the Palazzo Strozzi website. It occupies the piano nobile and the Renaissance courtyard. Opening hours are daily 10:00 to 20:00, Thursdays until 23:00, with last admission one hour before closing. Palazzo Strozzi has no permanent collection and closes between exhibitions, so there is nothing to visit between 24 August and 24 September 2026.

How much are tickets for Broken at Palazzo Strozzi?

As of August 2026 no price has been published. The Palazzo Strozzi tickets page still lists only the Rothko exhibition tariff, and the Broken booking page on Vivaticket exists but has no public pricing yet. The Rothko show ran at €15 for a dated ticket and €20 for an open date, which gives you a rough idea, though nothing confirms Broken will match it. Check the official page before you plan a budget.

Is Palazzo Strozzi included in the Firenze Card?

Yes. Palazzo Strozzi lists Firenzecard holders under free entry, and Firenzecard lists the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation among its museums with no reservation required and fast track. The card costs €85 and runs 72 hours from your first museum entry. The exclusion people expect does apply elsewhere: as a private foundation, Strozzi is not part of the state free-Sunday scheme and is not in any Uffizi or Pitti combined ticket.

Is Palazzo Strozzi worth visiting between exhibitions?

The courtyard is, and it costs nothing. You walk in free from Piazza Strozzi, Via Strozzi or Via Tornabuoni, and it usually holds a free contemporary installation plus the Project Space, three free rooms off the courtyard. The paid floor above is a different matter. When no exhibition is running there is nothing to buy a ticket for, and Google Maps keeps showing the venue as open anyway, which is the single most common complaint in its reviews.

Will Broken travel outside Florence?

Yes. Broken is co-organised with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which shows it from 13 March to 27 June 2027 in the West Building, with free admission. The Washington version is not identical: the NGA lists roughly 75 works to Florence's eighty-plus, and Paul Pfeiffer has been commissioned for a site-specific piece there, while Mark Manders has the Florence courtyard.

If you are in Florence between late September and January, this is the show that gives the Renaissance core an argument to push against, and it pairs naturally with a morning at the Uffizi or a slot in the one-day itinerary. If you are reading this in the gap before it opens, walk into the courtyard anyway. It is free, it is quiet, and Florence has little enough of either.